Report Center

This is one of the biggest things i'd like to see how you guys did. As i love the IP.Board way because it shows them as a thread but not posted and is easy to go through. Can we get pictures/video of the report center (with examples).

There is a "moderator tool bar" that is at the top of the page, that contains links to manage the moderation queue and all reported contents. Reports have states (open, assigned, resolved, rejected). I don't know the specifics of IPB's report center, but it sounds similar.

There is a "moderator tool bar" that is at the top of the page, that contains links to manage the moderation queue and all reported contents. Reports have states (open, assigned, resolved, rejected). I don't know the specifics of IPB's report center, but it sounds similar.

Click to expand...

Amongst others, I have been suggesting this to vBulletin for years. vBulletin still does not provide statuses on reports, but Invision does (let me tell you, in the past years I always felt they browsed the vBulletin Suggestions forum and implemented the good stuff vBulletin customers came up with themselves, but that's an assumption), so I am very glad to see XenForo has this aswell now!

There is a "moderator tool bar" that is at the top of the page, that contains links to manage the moderation queue and all reported contents. Reports have states (open, assigned, resolved, rejected). I don't know the specifics of IPB's report center, but it sounds similar.

Click to expand...

Amongst others, I have been suggesting this to vBulletin for years. vBulletin still does not provide statuses on reports, but Invision does (let me tell you, in the past years I always felt they browsed the vBulletin Suggestions forum and implemented the good stuff vBulletin customers came up with themselves, but that's an assumption), so I am very glad to see XenForo has this aswell now!

When I was a senior moderator for a pretty large forum, we had thousands of reports per day. Unfortunately, the report implementation was very much limited, and quite frankly, primitive. This wasn't alleviated by placing the reports into a staff forum. What would have helped was a system where the staff could see how many reports had been dealt with, acted on, and who did what, but additionally, which members reported posts the most, etc.These statistics would have been very useful in that the forum administrators could deduce further staff moderator appointments. I did end up coding a very custom report center for vBulletin, but I never released this to the public, and my license was exclusive to that forum.

Is the report system designed to deal with a large number of reports and reports of all content types?
A system quickly becomes confusing when you have thousands of reports relating to different forum areas, different content types, different situations, applications and urgencies.
Reports lead to moderator actions, edits, deletions, infractions, bans, etc.

Support questions & Communication methods.
Many frequently occurring questions can be answered by a good help system that allows users to ask a question and they are then taken to possible answers. The current FAQ is searchable, but try searching for 'How do I post an attachment?'. If users can't find what they need, they will contact the staff for support. The 'Sorry - no matches. Please try some different terms.' page in the FAQ does not direct users to any help options. No similar results. No direction to who to contact where or how.

vbulletin users generate a massive amount of support requests, but there is no way to handle these requests in a streamlined or logical way.

Support questions come in scattered across PM, VM, email, contact form and forum. Sometime trough all of these options and to several staff members. Support questions are in no way linked from member accounts nor is there much history of communication. If you have a mass of active members, then memory will often fail when it comes to former communication.

There is no way for staff to see a list of all open support questions, or the status of these issues. No one knows who's doing what. Many tasks and responsibilities go lost because of this and much lands on the shoulders of one or a few people.

Similarly, there is no way for staff to see which of their moderation or administration tasks are open. More about that later.

There needs to be a support system that centralizes support questions and integrates with the contact form and email.

There is no way to alert staff when they are off site. Urgent matters can be left unattended. A busy site will send many email reports per day, so one more report by email doesnt warn staff either.

A desktop application to alert moderators of issues and open tasks would focus attention where and when its needed. Such application could alert about open support issues, reports and moderated content. While not an absolute necessity it would be a good improvement.

Reports & infractions
The way reports and infractions work cause a lot of work, because there is no logical work flow and UX. Currently reports can lead to the following actions that staff needs to take:

Staff needs to made aware of / discuss troublesome or important members.

Aside from the 'delete as spam' function, the above actions are not integrated at all.

Reports can be automatically posted to a staff zone forum or emailed. Moderators can not see in vbulletins front end how many open reports are assigned to them. They should be confronted with this information somehow, so that its clear what reports they need to solve.

These reports should get a status, so everyone can see what's going on.

Multiple reports by ranking members (user groups) should send a post to the moderation queue.

The post report screen should have a drop down with reasons for the post report. These could correspond with those set in the infraction system.

Moderators should get a notice the number of open post reports they have. The post reports they need to process should be visible somewhere.

When assessing the problem, moderators should have the option to post a user note, which would be visible in the staff zone as a threaded content. But accessible on user profile and in the thread.

Moderators should also have the option to warn or infract, while the reason is pre-set with the reason the reporting member selected. Moderators should have the option to select another infraction reason.

Infractions should have canned texts (like promised by Jelsoft many moons ago)

If members receive multiple infractions within a short period or if ranking members get severe infraction, this should create an alert to the staff.

Reporting members should get a status report about their report.

Private Messages reports should have infraction functions.

There is no way to post a thread notice, so a warning in a post can quickly get buried and needs to be repeated several times.

There is no way to flag posts as problematic, except by posting a link in the staff zone.

Moderated content& moderation
Staff needs to approve all moderated content. Yet we need to look up if there is any moderated content in their userCP. There should be a notification in the front end, as soon as any moderated content enters the system.

There is no way of knowing what content has been read by staff and what content has not. This allows problematic content to stay under the radar, while other content may be reviewed by 10 moderators.

There should be a post or thread note function that allows staff to add comments to posts, only for staff to see.

Member tracking
User Notes are only accessible on user profiles. They are mostly forgotten and not used, because no one will see the user note, unless it is specifically looked up. Instead many boards use one or more staff discussion threads to post notes about members. Its extremely hard to track the behaviour of members on a busy site.

There should be a wall of user notes, with functionality for staff to post to the wall. Optimally there should be a positive and a negative wall. Such walls should be accessible in a staff zone.

When I was a senior moderator for a pretty large forum, we had thousands of reports per day. Unfortunately, the report implementation was very much limited, and quite frankly, primitive. This wasn't alleviated by placing the reports into a staff forum. What would have helped was a system where the staff could see how many reports had been dealt with, acted on, and who did what, but additionally, which members reported posts the most, etc.These statistics would have been very useful in that the forum administrators could deduce further staff moderator appointments. I did end up coding a very custom report center for vBulletin, but I never released this to the public, and my license was exclusive to that forum.

Is the report system designed to deal with a large number of reports and reports of all content types?
A system quickly becomes confusing when you have thousands of reports relating to different forum areas, different content types, different situations, applications and urgencies.
Reports lead to moderator actions, edits, deletions, infractions, bans, etc.

I was pleased and upset that Invision was the one who stepped in and introduced a little bit of that functionality in their product. Managing a big board becomes tedious when there are no proper, sophisticated tools to manage all the threads/moderation/infractions etc easily. Just as vrtsolus and Alfa1 are pointing out so rightfully. Hopefully we will see something along the lines in a future xenForo version. Then I am definately sold, if I wasn't already!

Sorry, I think the IPB way of handling reports stinks to high heaven. It's STILL treated as a modification and isn't fully integrated into the forum software. You cannot add additional groups to view the reports (unless you modify the core files), the failure of allowing replies to show up in View New Content is irritating to say the least, and treating it as a separate entity from the forum is just plain idiotic. It's a nice idea that was horribly implemented.

Sorry, I think the IPB way of handling reports stinks to high heaven. It's STILL treated as a modification and isn't fully integrated into the forum software. You cannot add additional groups to view the reports (unless you modify the core files), the failure of allowing replies to show up in View New Content is irritating to say the least, and treating it as a separate entity from the forum is just plain idiotic. It's a nice idea that was horribly implemented.

Click to expand...

At least it's better than having the current vBulletin implementation.